Juvenile Nonsense: Let a smile be your umbrella

Never one to bury the lead, I’m going to start this column by breaking the news that this will be my last Juvenile Nonsense. Obviously, the notion of Funday Monday becomes problematic under the new bi-weekly schedule, inasmuch as we don’t have a Monday paper and Funday Wednesday doesn’t rhyme (we could have done Funday Sunday, but it turns out that's trademarked by a Church for Clowns).

It’s been a privilege to give some of you something to laugh about each Monday and to give some of you a platform to show off your own comedic chops through Say What?! and through our “Where’s Denise?” and “Lip Fur for Fergs” contests. As to the rest of you, please know I’ve saved all of your angry Vox calls on my fridge, and I read through them all whenever I’m feeling dangerously self-confident (point in fact, the name “Juvenile Nonsense” came from a Vox caller who hated my column).

In honor of all the contributors who have stepped up to this open-mic newspaper-based comedy insert, everything this week apart from this column came from you guys. Funday Monday has some of the funniest readers in the world, and I thank you all for staying away from my house.

But before I send this section off to the glue factory, I’d like to make a plea to all of you.

Please find something to laugh about. Every day. Especially now, when you look around and everything’s kind of falling apart.

It’s important.

The riots that just ravaged London were obviously tragic and avoidable. But just because one of the most amazing cities on earth was being torched and looted by a subculture known as “chavs” (because the British are too polite to use the term “jerkwads”), doesn’t mean there wasn’t something worth laughing about.

For example, there’s this one video from the riots that shows one “chav” attempting to spear a line of riot police with a patio umbrella. In as dramatic a fashion as he can muster, the chav reels back and hurls the umbrella like a poorly-dressed Captain Ahab.

The umbrella, being an umbrella, opens wide about halfway toward its target and flutters halmlessly down to the ground (where it is immediately burned and looted).

For a few seconds in that video, while that umbrella pops open and glides down, everything seems to stop. Everyone’s eye seems to follow that umbrella to the ground (possibly while wondering who stole Mary Poppins’ ride) and then the most amazing thing happens.

They laugh.

The police, the chavs, the guy looking to secure his shop, “Lord Pennybone’s Fine English Dandy Accessories, Ltd.,” from looters; they all start chuckling. Even the idiot who threw the umbrella probably cracks a grin.

If Londoners can find something to laugh about while being tear gassed, surely you can muster a grin every now and again.

Look at it this way; if you can’t laugh at the world, what else can you do but cry? You can call the Vox, I suppose, but have you read the Vox lately? Don’t be that guy.

And for my own small part, I hope this section has been like that umbrella for you; just a short pop each week that takes you out of your daily struggle with the jerkwads for a few minutes and lets your have a laugh.

And if it hasn’t, rest assured you still have a place on my fridge.

P.S. A huge thank you to former BT staffer Stephanie Ingersoll for first coming up with the idea for Funday Monday, and for the hilariously misguided decision to give me a column.